Tag Archives: Science

Sinkhole costs, and prevention vs. reaction



The day after the VDT ran

Lowndes County’s admission that the sewer line break was theirs, not Valdosta’s,
did the VDT start a series of financial investigation

like they did about Valdosta’s water issues?
Nope, they ran a piece about how much weather costs the county,
with no recognition of watershed-wide issues,
nor of any need for the county to participate in proactively
dealing with them, to reduce costs, for better quality of life,
to attract the kinds of businesses we claim we want.
Nope, none of that.

Jason Schaefer wrote for the VDT 27 April 2013,

What natural events cost Lowndes taxpayers,



In the Deep South, near a river plain where floodwaters rise and ebb
from season to season and wetlands that distinguish the region from
anywhere else in the nation, flooding makes a significant portion of
the concern for Lowndes County emergency management.

OK, that’s close to getting at some of the basic issues.
We’re all in the same watershed, and we need to act like it
instead of every developer and every local government
clearcutting and paving as if water didn’t run downhill.
Does the story talk about that?
After all, the county chairman attended the

11 April 2013 watershed-wide flooding meeting
that led to the

city of Valdosta’s likely participation in flodoplain planning.
Nope; according to the VDT,
everybody around here seems to be hapless victims of weather:

Continue reading →

Believe So. Cal. Edison about San Onofre?

Should we believe the operator of the broken San Onofre 2
nuclear plant that it’s safe to restart at 70% power?
The same operator

that knew the now-broken steam generators were flawed before it installed them?

Recommended by

the same NRC staff who couldn’t answer opponents’ questions?
The same NRC that

doesn’t publish licensee documents
and says that’s

never been a practice?



SanDiego6.com wrote yesterday,

Sen. Boxer Blasts Report on San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station,

On Monday, Southern California Edison announced it had formalized a
request to amend its operating license to allow it to operate its
Unit 2 reactor at 70 percent beginning June 1.

The reactor was undergoing scheduled maintenance in January 2012
when a small, non-injury leak was discovered in plant’s other
reactor. The plant has been shut down since.

According to Edison, vibrations that led to premature wearing of
steam pressure tubes in the reactors don’t occur at 70 percent
power. The utility wants to operate on limited power for the five
warm weather months and then shut down for an inspection of the
tubes.

After the inspection, the reactor would resume operating at 70
percent power. The company said it would use the collected tube data
to determine an appropriate power setting for the long term.

There’s the catch:

Continue reading →

Circular wastewater firing squad continues

The VDT's Sunday front page was covered with wastewater stories,
continuing the circular firing squad of the local powers that be.
Meanwhile

in Dublin, GA, they're breaking ground for solar panels
at the local high school, using a bond financing
model that we could use here, if local leaders would look up.



In addition to

some detail about the city's FEMA application
and

following up on flooded yards,
the VDT followed up on

its EPD and EPA scrutiny story
with one saying

City received help from EPD to keep EPA away.
It's good the VDT is covering these issues, but it's still leaving out
important parts of the local water story.

Apparently firing back at



Thursday's Valdosta City Council session,
perhaps especially

Robert Yost's very pointed criticisms of the VDT,
the VDT concluded its

rather rich Sunday editoral:

City leaders, please, no more of the blame game. The citizens of
this community are imploring you to just accept responsibility and
fix it.

Yet the VDT has

spent the last week blaming the city,
and has accepted no responsibility for its own role, or that of
its editor, Kay Harris, in the recent loss of the SPLOST referendum
that would have further funded wastewater work in Valdosta.

Now, I agree with the VDT that

Continue reading →

Fracking north Georgia

Fracking, coming to north Georgia soon.

Dan Chapman wrote for the AJC Sunday,

Gas drillers turn to Georgia


Conasauga Field
DALTON, Ga. — Trillions of cubic feet of natural gas believed
to lie below the hills of northwest Georgia have remained virtually
untouched and unwanted — until now.

Shale gas drilling is slowing across the country, but a handful of
companies are poking around this corner of the state looking for the
next natural gas “play.” If they succeed, Georgia could join the
ranks of states reaping jobs, revenue and fears of environmental
damage from energy production, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has
learned….

In Alabama, the Conasauga shale field contains 625 trillion cubic
feet of gas, according to Bill Thomas, a geologist who taught at the
University of Kentucky and Georgia State. A similar amount could be
underground in Northwest Georgia, he added.



Wish I didn’t have to say I told you so:

Fracking: coming soon to a state near you? 26 Dec 2012.

No fracking.
No nuclear.
No biomass.
Let’s get on with solar and wind.

-jsq

 

Nuclear is over —Jeremy Rifkin



Economist, author, and advisor to governments

Jeremy Rifkin
told an agent of the world's largest uranium field operator
at a conference of global investors that there's no business
future in nuclear power.

Jeremy Rifkin answered a question at the

Wermuth Asset Management

5th Annual Investors Event 26 September 2012,

Nuclear Power is Dead,

I don't spend much time on nuclear technology, unless somebody asks


me about it, because frankly from a business perspective, I think
it's over….

Here's

the video, followed by more transcript and discussion.

Nuclear power was pretty well dead in the water in
the 1980s after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. It had a comeback.
The comeback was the industry said "we are part of the solution for
climate change because we don't emit CO2 with nuclear; it's
polluting, but there's no CO2".

Here's the issue though,

Continue reading →

Let the Sun Shine: Fact versus Fiction —Michael G. Noll

LTE in the VDT today. I’ve added a few links. -jsq



Fox News recently claimed that “solar won’t work in America because
it’s not as sunny as Germany”. Such statements are common for a
network that has long lost its credibility. Unfortunately too many
take such gibberish at face value. Thus columns like

“environmentalism or obstructionism?” are not
surprising, but in the end it’s the facts that matter:

  • Global warming is real. For years we have been experiencing record
    heat waves, droughts, wild fires, etc., and while seawater levels
    are rising, storms like hurricane Sandy become major threats

    to low lying areas along coast lines    .
  • The main culprit for global warming are greenhouse gases like
    carbon dioxide, resulting from the burning of fossil fuels,
    especially coal and oil.
  • While China overall emits more than we do, the US leads in per
    capita emissions. The average US citizen produces three times more
    carbon dioxide than the average Chinese citizen.

Continue reading →

Rep. Austin Scott (R GA-08) @ VLCoC 2013-01-10




Ron Borders
introduced

Congressman Austin Scott (R GA-08) who

made some remarks
on the front porch at the Chamber of Commerce Thursday 10 January 2013.

Bookended by some formulaic remarks about debt
(without mentioning
that
it’s already mostly solved),
the Congressman noted he is on the Committee on Armed Services.
He said there is no current

BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure Commission),
although one has been asked for.
He said a BRAC wouldn’t do anything for near-term debt, anyway
(but he didn’t say anything about ending the war in Afghanistan
or stopping funding for un-needed weapons systems as ways of saving money).

He said he is the chair of a House Agriculture Subcommitee
(Horticulture, Research, Biotechnology, and Foreign Agriculture).
He said he was for research, for the agricultural extension,
and for agricultural exports.

Here’s

the WCTV news report, with responses by Gretchen Quarterman,
Chair of the Lowndes County Democratic Party (LCDP).

Here’s

a video playlist:

Continue reading →

Failed concrete: the bane of nuclear reactors

Let’s not forget the failed concrete on which

Plant Vogtle’s unprotected stranded reactor vessel is supposed to sit.

A week before

the reactor vessel train wreck, news stories
said concrete pouring was delayed due to “noncompliant rebar”.
Thomas Clements elaborated for the Aiken Leader 14 January 2013,

Vogtle AP1000 Nuclear Reactor Vessel Discovered Unprotected, Stranded in Savannah Port since December 15 Shipment Failure,



Due to chronic delays in the pouring of “nuclear
concrete” for the basemat of the AP1000 units at Vogtle and VC
Summer, it remains unknown when or if any reactor vessels can
actually be placed into the excavated holes at the sites. A January
10 meeting of the NRC confirmed that another basemat-related
“license amendment request” (LAR) was soon to be filed
by SCE&G for its AP1000 project and that the target date for
granting of the LAR was March 18. It appears that the Vogtle project
has fallen behind the V.C. Summer project and no strategy for the
filing of a similar and necessary LAR by Southern Company is known.




Concrete, the long-time bane of

Seabrook Station
and also what’s keeping

Crystal River shut down because nobody wants to pay the
billions of dollars it would take to fix it.

 




What say we call the whole thing off, like
Dominion Power did with its existing

Kewaunee nuke,
and
TEPCO and NRG did

with their plans for new South Texas nukes.

 



Maybe it’s a sign that meanwhile

Google has invested a billion dollars in wind and solar and gotten
2 gigawatts of power, almost as much as the 2.2 GW the two new Vogtle nukes
were supposed to produce, except Google’s solar and wind projects
are online on time, and for less than just the cost overruns at Vogtle.

The Georgia legislature is in session.
You can contact

your legislator or the PSC today
about

toppling Southern Company’s three-legged nuclear regulatory-capture stool
and

fixing that 1973 Territoriality Law
so we can get on with solar and wind in Georgia,
for jobs and energy independence, and oh by the way clean air and
plenty of clean

water.

-jsq

Centralized Nuclear Bad Investment?

A writer for Forbes spells out the question of nuclear investment:
how can something that expensive, over-budget, late, and phenomenally
risky be a good investment, especially when cheaper and faster energy
sources are readily available?

Peter Kelly-Detwiler wrote for Forbes today,

New Centralized Nuclear Plants: Still an Investment Worth Making?



Just a few years ago, the US nuclear renaissance seemed at hand. It
probably shouldn’t have been. Cost overruns from Finland to France
to the US were already becoming manifest, government guarantees were
in doubt, and shale gas drillers were beginning to punch holes into
the ground with abandon.

Then came Fukushima. The latter proved a somewhat astonishing
reminder of forgotten lessons about nuclear power risks, unique to
that technology: A failure of one power plant in an isolated


location can create a contagion in countries far away, and even
where somewhat different variants of that technology are in use.
Just as Three Mile Island put the kaibosh on nuclear power in the US
for decades, Fukushima appears to have done the same for Japan and
Germany, at a minimum. It certainly did not help public opinion, and
at a minimum, the effect of Fukushima will likely be to increase
permitting and associated regulatory costs.

He goes into detail: they take too long (while gas and solar got cheaper),
they’re extremely expensive to build and run, and they’re all-or-nothing
investments.

I was going to compile this list of recent nuclear financial failures,
but he saves us all the trouble:

Continue reading →

Vogtle reactor vessel sitting unprotected at Savannah port

What happened to Plant Vogtle’s new reactor vessel after

it was in a train wreck a week ago?
It went back to Savannah port and sits there unprotected and unguarded.

Thomas Clements wrote for the Aiken Leader 14 January 2013,

Vogtle AP1000 Nuclear Reactor Vessel Discovered Unprotected, Stranded in Savannah Port since December 15 Shipment Failure,




Tom Clements, Alliance for Nuclear Accountability

The reactor pressure vessel (RPV) for the chronically delayed Vogtle
AP1000 reactor construction project near Waynesboro, Georgia sits
stranded and seemingly unprotected in the port of Savannah. The
special railroad car carrying the 300-ton vessel had unknown
mechanical problems on December 15 on exiting the port. The NRC has
said that the vessel only got one-quarter mile before a sound was
heard and the car stopped. Plans by Westinghouse and Southern
Company to move the vessel are unknown. It is also unknown if the
railroad car can be repaired and used or if the railroad company
which owns the line is concerned that the rail car might break down
again on its line in an in accessible place. Meanwhile, the
apparently unguarded reactor might be subject to sabotage and sits
in apparent violation of NRC quality assurance and “administrative
control” regulations.

The article includes links to several more pictures
taken 13 January 2013 by Tom Clements of

Alliance for Nuclear Accountability,
such as this one with the bridge clearly visible:

Continue reading →